Delays, rudeness and poor claims handling are grounds for ordering financial services firms to compensate customers, the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has said. Payments can be ordered in addition to other remedies.

There's something about the oil business that turns even intelligent people into frothmouthed loons: they're raping the planet, shafting Joe Sixpack or, from the other side, insisting that the drill in every back yard is the very definition of America. I realise that in the middle of an election that the small still voice of reason isn't going to get much airplay but let's give it the old school try anyway.

Symantec today claimed its biggest win to date in Europe in a software piracy case. The software company received £700,000 in damages and costs from Nusoft Trading Ltd, an Essex, UK distributor of counterfeit Symantec software.

Eager punters cooing over their 3G iPhones are finding the third generation connectivity not quite what they had hoped, and according to some reports Apple's super-phone is failing to meet the requirements of the 3G standard.

When it debuted in July of 2004, Yelp reinvented the notion of online city guides, giving "real people" the power to write "real reviews." For many, it represents the best of something called Web 2.0, a site built by you and me and everyone else. But in its struggle to turn clicks into cash, the San Francisco startup has been known to hedge this egalitarian ideal, playing games with the very concept that made it so popular.

On Sunday morning, security consultant Alan Shimel woke to discover that his personal blog, which is frequented by countless peers and reporters, was pointing to a website featuring explicit gay porn. Equally disturbing, he found someone had cracked open his Yahoo! Mail account and aired sensitive documents he filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Shhh. Don't tell anyone but IBM has announced its XIV extremely scalable storage system, the one acquired with the XIV purchase earlier this year, the one with the technology designed by Moshe Yanai, the originator of EMC's Symmetrix.

NetApp's earnings climbed 11 per cent during its fiscal first quarter 2009, but margins were thin due to growing interest in low-end storage and an investment "surge" that the company expects to pay off in the second half of the year.